Bowling

Bowled last night for the first time in almost 10 years.  Arm is not as sore as o thought it would be, and that's good.

Visual Studio Live 2014

Learning lots of cool things here in Redmond at Microsoft headquarters.  Met a lot of friendly people and experts, even got used to the time change from the east coast.  All in all a worthwhile trip.  Will be glad to fly home and use what I have learned.

Steelers going to the Super Bowl...

My beloved Steelers are back in the big game - I really didn't think they would make it this year, but they have been the most consistent team in the league. And the fact they had the extra week off, that really helped them be ready for both the Chargers and the Ravens. Now they have another week off and then the big one in Tampa. Let's go Steelers!!!!

Iron Man Movie

Ok - So last weekend my kids and I helped make Iron Man the number 1 movie in America. The movie was awesome. I missed about 20 minutes of it because my son (who is allergic to peanuts and tree nuts) had an allergic reaction to the popcorn (at least I think that's what it was - sometimes they use peanut oil to pop the corn), and I had to get him to the men's room, watch him get sick, run out to the car and get the Benedryl, clean him and the stall up, ask him if he wanted to go home (says no - I feel fine now, dad), get back to our seats and have my daughter get us caught up in what we missed. WHEW!

Needless to say, I missed one of the best parts, but at least it didn't spoil the movie completely. I recommend the movie highly - 4 out of 5 stars (****)

Convert Array to ArrayList

I found a really easy way to convert an Array to an ArrayList without having to iterate through the array collection.

I found this on a website - http://www.dotnetspider.com/kb/Article1709.aspx.

The original code was in C#, but I converted it to VB for my purposes...

Dim ArrayListObject As ArrayList = ArrayList.Adapter(ArrayObject)

Just too simple...

Saving Green by Going Green...

I've heard a lot recently about how much money we waste on home electric via "power vampires", adapters, phone chargers, etc., that use energy even when we're not using them.

One of the main culprits mentioned are home computers, whether they be laptops or desktops. Experts say that shutting these items off when not in use can save a ton on your electric bill. I decided to try this, since I am not made of money :)

I started looking for some type of software that would shut off my computers at a specific time of day, say, middle of the evening when no one is awake. I found several software titles (mostly shareware), but since I am frugal (cheap), I decided to do some investigating of my own to see if my operating system already had such a feature - in a way, it did, and here's how I'm doing it...

First, I did a search for a line command in Windows XP (my OS) that would shutdown my computer automatically (without clicking or typing anything). I found that "shutdown.exe" does exactly this and it has options to go with it, such as displaying a message to the user, to forcing all programs to close no matter what. So now I had a way to shutdown the computer with a single command line - how could I get this to run at a specific time of day? I didn't have to look far...

In Control Panel, there is a lonely applet called Scheduled Tasks. It's usually empty and never used, except for certain programs that utilize it to run certain programs or commands on a certain schedule - just what I was looking for.

To make this post shorter, here's what I did next:

• created a batch file and put the shutdown.exe command in it with the command arguments I wanted.
• placed the batch file in a folder by itself in the root of drive (for simplicity purposes - I knew where it was and what it was)
• created a scheduled task that runs the shutdown batch file at a specific time each day (in the late evening)- I did the same to all my computers so they would all shutdown around the same time.

I'm not sure how much money I am saving by shutting all the equipment down when not is use, but I am sure that it can't hurt.

One of my favorites...

Saw this on the web and just had to put it here for all to see - enjoy the trailer to the new Indiana Jones movie... it's above on the top of the blog space...